WASHINGTON — Fifty-five colleges and universities — including Swarthmore College, Penn State University and Temple University — are under investigation for their handling of sexual abuse complaints under Title IX, U.S. Department of Education officials revealed Thursday.

Their decision to release the list is unprecedented and comes as the Obama administration seeks to shed greater transparency on the issue of sexual assault in higher education and how it is handled.

In the future, education department officials said they will keep an updated list of schools facing such an investigation and make it available upon request.

The schools range from big public universities, like Ohio State University, the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Arizona State University, to private schools, like Knox College in Illinois, Swarthmore College and Catholic University of America in the District of Columbia. Ivy League schools, including Harvard, Princeton and Dartmouth, are also on the list.

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Title IX prohibits gender discrimination at schools that receive federal funds. It is the same law that guarantees women equal access to sports, but it also regulates institutions’ handling of sexual violence and increasingly is being used by victims who say their schools failed to protect them.

Not included in the list are investigations that fall under the Clery Act, legislation inspired by the April 1986 rape and murder of Jeanne Clery of Wayne by a fellow student in Clery’s Lehigh University dormitory room. The law requires college and university officials to report crime statistics on or near their campuses, to develop prevention policies and ensure victims their basic rights.

In April 2013, when interviewed about alleged sexual assaults on campus and the filing of a Clery Act violation complaint with the U.S. Department of Education by 12 students, Swarthmore College President Rebecca Chopp told the Daily Times: “We will certainly cooperate with Department of Education (if an investigation occurs). We understand our moral obligation to the students and we understand our legal obligation, as well.”

She said measures to address complaints that Swarthmore officials had not reported violations of a sexual nature to civil authorities and discouraged students who were alleged victims of sexual crimes from coming forward were under way.

On Thursday, Swarthmore College Secretary and Vice President for Communications Nancy Nicely said in a prepared statement: “Since the complaint was filed a year ago, Swarthmore has worked tirelessly to institute a comprehensive series of major, intensive and expansive changes meant to turn this college into a model of proactivity in preventing, addressing, responding to, and adjudicating sexual assault and harassment.

“We are determined to let no instance of any such behavior exist unaddressed on this campus. We fully embrace the letter, the spirit, and the essence of the Department of Education’s ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, and other guidance. We are cooperating completely with the Department of Education and it is up to them to rule on the allegations’ veracity.”

Federal education department officials previously would confirm such an investigation when asked, but students and others were often unaware of them.

“We hope this increased transparency will spur community dialogue about this important issue,” Catherine E. Lhamon, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, said in a statement.

Lhamon said a school’s appearance on the list does not mean that it has violated the law, but that an investigation is ongoing.

Some investigations were prompted by complaints directly to the department; others were initiated by the department after a regular compliance review. That was the case at Dartmouth, where investigators visited the Hanover, New Hampshire, campus in late January to speak with students, faculty and alumni.

“We are hopeful at the end of this there will be a resolution that will strengthen our internal processes and result in a safer community,” Dartmouth spokesman Justin Anderson said Thursday. “There’s always something we can learn and ways to get better.”

Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, a higher education group, said most of the schools were probably aware there was such an investigation.

“I think that every college and university in the current environment is concerned about the need to be very attentive to what they are doing with regard to policies and procedures” related to sexual assault on campuses, Meloy said.

Citing research, the White House has said that 1 in 5 female students is assaulted. President Barack Obama appointed a task force composed of his cabinet members to review the issue after hearing complaints about the poor treatment of campus rape victims and the hidden nature of such crimes.

The task force announced the creation of a website, notalone.gov, offering resources for victims and information about past enforcement actions on campuses. The task force also made a wide range of recommendations to schools, such as identifying confidential victims’ advocates and conducting surveys to better gauge the frequency of sexual assault on campuses.

The department publicized guidance on Title IX’s sexual assault provisions in 2011, and complaints by students have since increased. Complaints, however, don’t always lead to an investigation.

The department can withhold federal funding from a school that doesn’t comply with the law, but it so far has not used that power and instead has negotiated voluntary resolutions for violators.

Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have said noncompliance under the law is “far too common.” They say a lack of federal resources is partly to blame for that, and they’ve sought more money to ensure timely and proper investigations.